FACTS which contradict what is taught in the universities and which even run counter to the assumptions made by critics of misandry.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Olive Sternaman, Canadian Black Widow - 1897

FULL TEXT: Cayuga, May 8. The gift of prophecy evidently
lies with the wives of the Sternaman household. Shortly before the marriage
ofGeorge H. Sternaman to the widow
Olive, his mother said that if he married her he would be dead in six months.
Her prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. Last November the younger Mrs.
Sternaman, after being sentenced to death, after a verdict of murder against
her, stood up in the dock and said, “I‘ll get a new trial and be acquitted.”
Her prophecy has also been fulfilled to the letter. Six months ago a jury of
Haldimand free men pronounced her guilty of murdering her two husbands; ona Saturday night another jury of Haldimand
farmers pronounced her not guilty. She is free, after twenty months of
imprisonment, to go where she wills and do what she pleases. The spectacle of a
woman a second time within the shadows of the gallows, which has drawn half the
population of the county to the court-house for the past four days, is ended,
and everyone is satisfied. The favourable verdict is undoubtedly a popular one
– if anything more popular than the unfavourable one of the last November.

~ SCENE IN THE COURT. ~

The jury filed into is room at 5.15, having listened to
seven hours of speeches from counsel and judges. The court-room had been packed
all day. Far aloft men and boys who had climbed up outside had climbed up
outside sat with their feet dangling through the windows, looking down on the
throng below. In the gallery women were packed like sardines; on the floor of
the court-room a mass of humanity that drove the counsel for their seats, the
reporters from their table, and threatened the judge on his bench and the jury
in its box. Around the prisoner, who sat with her hand covering her face, but
one eye gleaming between her fingers, the people surged. She seemed to be on
fire as she sat there, listening to the words of the speakers. A fever burned
hands and face to a deep crimson, and when she followed the jury out she bent
with weakness, and seemed hardly able to walk.

In the hot court-room, with the evening sunlight shining
through the murky atmosphere, the throng waited. At length, at 7.15, after two
hours’ absence, the jury came back. The prisoner was brought in, trembling with
expectancy. The foreman was interrogated as to whether he had arrived at a
verdict. “We cannot come to an agreement,” he saidhis Lordship was preemptory. “You must go
back to your room,” said he. “I cannot let you go so soon.” And so the hungry
jurors were locked up again. On the prisoner the effect of the prolongation of
the agony she was suffering was extreme. Again the crowded parted to let her
pass out of the court-room, this time in a state of absolute collapse. As the
evening wore on the throng increased. Farmers and their families from twenty
miles away drove into town in the evening to see the denouement of the drama.

~ THE VERDICT. ~

At 9.30 p. m. the jury filed into court again. The judge was
sent for, and ordered the constables to bring in the prisoner. A pathway had to
be made through the sea of waiting humanity. Yet there was delay. Physical fear
had paralyzed the limbs of the prisoner, and for some moments she could not
walk. Finally she was brought shambling in, and sank down with bowed head.

The delay had served to increase the intensity of the
situation. The nerves of everyone were stretched to the straining point. The
roll-call of the jurors seemed as if it would last forever. Finally came the
formal, “Gentlemen of the jury, have you arrived at a verdict?” and the answer,
“Yes, not guilty.” The men burst into cheers and the women gave vent to a great
sigh of relief. The prisoner tried to rise, but sank down and sobbed. A moment
later she stood up again and uttered an unintelligible word of thanks.

His Lordship addressed her briefly: – “Olive Sternaman, a
jury of your countrymen having found you not guilty of the crime with which you
were charged, the law has no further claim on you, and you are free to go where
you will.”

Gaoler Murphy then led the freed woman through the crowd,
laughing with happiness now and with tears running down her cheeks. In the
gaoler’s house Rev. Mr. Foote, her mother, sisters, and relatives were waiting
to see her. the freed woman was kissed and laughed and cried over and
congratulated.

~ MRS. STERNAMAN INTERVIEWED. ~

Ten minutes after the verdict the representative of The Mail
and Empire interviewed Mrs. Sternaman. She was in an excited frame of mind, and
was laughing with excitement.

“I can’t realize it. I can’t realize it!” she said, covering
her face with her hands. “It seems like a dream. I feel as if I would have to
go back to the court-room and be tried again to-morrow. I won’t realize it for
days! I felt sure I would get off, though, until the jury disagreed. Then I
gave up. I didn’t want to live. I’d just as soon have died as go through
another trial. I thought that if the jury disagreed after all Mr. Johnson is
the best lawyer in the world. At least I don’t think there is any better lawyer
in the world than him.”

The woman went on talking volubly, and finally got upon the
subject of Mr. German, who defended her at her first trial. “He couldn’t get me
off because he wouldn’t accept my word that I was innocent. I knew all the time
he thought I was guilty,” she said.

She was asked where she intended to go. “I’m going to
Buffalo next week, and I’m going to Buffalo next week, and I’m going to work
there. I’m going to make it hot for those devils the insurance men. You’ll see
what I’ll do.”

She mentioned a certain Buffalo man who testified, and said,
“I’m going to go back with a witness and pay him back in a way he’ll remember.
I’m going to have articles put in the Buffalo papers about those insurance
men.”

“I suppose your means are exhausted?” said the reporter.

“Yes, but I don’t care about the means if I have my
liberty.”

Later in the evening Mrs. Sternaman left for Rainham with
her relatives. She couldn’t walk on the sidewalk, so unfamiliar have streets
grown to her feet, and with a sense of pure luxury she walked out in the dust
of the road just to experience a sensation that she had thought herself cut off
from forever.

There are persistent rumours in Cayuga that she is soon to
be married to a business man of the country, who had been among her constant
visitors.

~ MRS. JOHNSON’S ADDRESS. ~

Mrs. Johnson commenced his address at fifteen minutes to ten
in the morning. His first words were: –

“Twice tried for her life. Twice within shadows of the
gallows, and of death. Twenty long months of imprisonment hanging over her
head. Life is sweet to all of us, and doubly sweet because of those we love.
Such is the life that I stand pleading for, not the life of a man, strong,
vigorous, active, and young, but the life of a poor, defenceless, lone woman,
so defenceless that to make her defence she has to depend on the charity of the
Crown to get the evidence she has produced here. So penniless that she has to
depend on the pittance and the charity of friends to bring me here to perform
whatever feeble service I may have rendered.” The prisoner he went on to
describe as one exposed to the terrible persecution of her enemies. Every act
of her life had been seized on, and exposed.

“I stand alone against terrible odds,” said Mr. Johnson.
“From the Crown counsel to the lowest detective. I feel that I cannot make a
fair fight against the odds. I cannot cope with the strong pressure that has
been brought to bear against this woman.” He went on describe Mr. Oster as the
ablest criminal lawyer in Canada, in whose hands he felt himself a mere
plaything, a man about whom it had been said that he had the power to convict
the innocent and free the guilty.”

“I want no verdict of sympathy,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I want
a verdict of truth and justice. Though this woman be the guiltiest alive, I
maintain that therown has not brought
it home to her.”

Mr. Johnson spoke until half-past one, dealing very harshly
with Crown witnesses. Coroner John he called a blowhard, undertaker Snider he
described as a perjurer, and the insurance men from the United States,
persecutors of a low type. The mother of the dead man he denounced as the
arch-enemy of the prisoner.

He followed the policy of casting doubt on every jot of
Crown evidence. In winding up he pleaded with the jurors to deliver her little
children out of the clutch of the hangman.

~ MR. OSLER SPEAKS. ~

Mr. Osler, in addressing the jury, was moderate to a degree,
but age a statement of the evidence, and what he considered fair inferences
from each. The similarity of the illnesses of the two husbands, beginning in
each case with a luncheon prepared by the hand of the wife. History told them
that the one who kisses may also kill. The fact that the wife had expected a
larger insurance than was collected, and her oiffer to give up the $1,000
policy if enquiries were dropped, were dwelt on. Insurance had nothing to do
with guilt or innocence. The fact that two doctors in Buffalo and two in Canada
had diagnosed the case of Sternaman as arsenical poisoning. The silence of the
woman when asked by Dr. Parke if any previous doctor had suggested arsenic to
her was a pronounced indication of guilt. The tastelessness of arsenic was also
pointed out.

Speaking of the embalming question, Mr. Osler said the onus
of proving it rested with the defence, and it had not brought one jot of
evidence showing that embalming had been done. It was not what Snider said, but
what he did, that they were concerned with. The whole defence was built on
that, for which there was no evidence.

~ THE JUDGE’S CHARGE. ~

Chancellor Boyd, in charging the jury, first of all
commented on some of Mr. Johnson’s statements, saying that it was necessary
that suspicious deaths should be investigated, and the prisoner was not in any
proper sense a victim of persecution. He believed also that witnesses as a rule
tried to speak the truth, and that no charge of perjury could be sustained
against the Crown witnesses. He also censured the denunciation of the insurance
men, saying that Americans who came voluntarily to help the Crown submit be
protected.

Reviewing the case historically, he said that it was
divisible into two parts, that which took place in Canada. He thought the
evidence cogent and strong that Sternaman died of arsenical poisoning. Then the
question arose of how it was administered. They must consider whether Sternaman
would have suicided by taking small doses of whether he would not have taken
one big dose and ended his life at once. It was difficult to see why a suicide
should call in a doctor and go through the farce of consenting to go to a
hospital. The question of embalming arose in connection with the arsenic found
in the body. Assuming that Snider did puncture the intestines as he at first
intimated, and that a little of the fluid got into the intestines, would any
such quantity of arsenic as that sworn to by Dr. Ellis get into the body?
Speaking of her conduct, if guilt were assumed it was in the prisoner’s
interest to pose as a loving wife in order not to excite his suspicions. The
concealment of Dr. Frost’s diagnosis of poisoning from the doctors who attended
him subsequently and her flippant comment that the doctors could find it out
for themselves was not the conduct ofd a loving wife. In conclusion he
intimated that the evidence that poison was administered in Canada was very
slight. He told the jury that in case of possible development it must decide
this question of the place of administration as well as that of guilt.

The charge lasted about fifty minutes, and was a very
complete summary of the facts.

~ THE INTERNATIONAL QUESTION. ~

If Mrs. Sternaman had been convicted it was not the
intention of the judge to sentence her then and there, because of the point
raised by Mr. Johnson on the question of jurisdiction. Had it been necessary it
was the intention of the Crown to ask that the intention of the Crown to ask
that the Canadian jury be upheld under an Imperial Act passed about fifty years
ago governing crime on the high seas, and also containing the provision that in
case of death in Imperial dominions from a stroke or poison administered in any
place out of a colony the guilty person could be tried in a British court of
law. The Privy Council has decided that this Act applies only to British
subjects.

~ NOTES. ~

It is generally admitted that, although the verdict was
against the Crown’s contention, the case against the prisoner was a stronger
one than on its first presentation. Inspector John Murray had his evidence all
in good order, and if neglect of duty existed it was purely local.

It is interesting to note that the judge, Chancellor Boyd,
the court reporter, NelsonR. Butcher,
the Crown counsel, B. B. Osler, Q. C., the defendant’s counsel, E. F. B.
Johnston, were precisely the same as at the trial of Clara Ford for murder. The
minute also had the good luck to be acquitted.

[“Mrs. Sternaman Goes Scott Free. – Jurors First Disagree
and Then Refuse to Convict the Prisoner. The Freed Woman’s Words. Impressive
Scene in the Court-Room on Saturday Night – Strong Charge by the Judge.” The Daily
Mail and Empire (Toronto, Canada), May 9, 1898, p. 3]